So the other day I watched Whale Rider. I came across it randomly in a movie rental shop, and had a flashback to high school when I saw it with my sister. If the movie had a plot line, I wouldn’t have known because all I remembered of the movie was my sister’s complaining. “These people aren’t making any sense,” she said. “There are no subtitles,” she said. “I’m bored. Let’s just go back to the news,” she said. I hadn’t learned too much about New Zealand, both the country and its English, before that movie, and sadly, I didn’t learn as much as I should have from the movie. So I picked it up again, and when I played it, I (perhaps wisely) set it to what I knew to be an understandable language – Japanese.
Having seen it again, here is my opinion: it was a good movie. The characters by themselves were interesting people, but it was the relationships that really wowed me. For those of you who don’t know, it’s the story of a Maori village which is suffering. The population is shrinking. The people who remain are entrenched in ennui. The community needs a strong leader to continue to hold it together. The current, aging patriarch, Koro, demands that tradition be followed, and tradition demands that the oldest son take on the mantle of the patriarch. The problem is that Koro’s oldest son is overseas and absent, and his oldest son was stillborn. He was left with a daughter, Paikea. The oldest son named her for their legendary, whale-riding ancestor, but according to tradition, girls cannot be the chief. So Koro is raising Paikea and while he does love his granddaughter in his own way, the bitterness in him is obvious during their interactions. She represents the end of the line of leaders. No matter how spirited, well-versed, well-spoken, and thoughtful she is, she will not be able to lead on account of her gender. Even then, she wants to learn about the traditions. The strength of the movie is in how it shows the relationships between all of the characters, showing how they learn and grow together, and in introducing Maori culture to the audience who probably knows little to nothing about it. It’s good. Go watch it.
I myself am going to watch it again; this time, in English. I want to solve the little mystery of why my sister and I had so much trouble understanding the characters the first time. Most of it, I think, had to do with the fact that it was our first time hearing the New Zealand accent outside of Peter Jackson’s old movies. According to Wikipedia, the New Zealand accent tends to use a sound called “schwa” more than other dialects of English. The schwa is a middle sound, tends to crop up in words when speaking fast, and is the most common vowel in English. Well, New Zealanders use it even more. So if an Aussie says the words “fish and chips” it will sound something like [ˈfiʃ ən ˌtʃips] whereas in New Zealand the same words would sound like [ˈfɘʃ ən ˌtʃɘps]. If you’re used to this kind of English, it’s no big deal. But hearing it for the first time is a bit of an eyebrow raiser. Another vowel shift is found in the short “e” sound like the one in “yes”; Kiwis seem to pronounce this with a short “i” sound like the one in “bit”. If I ever heard anyone say “yis” as an affirmation, my brain would probably system error until it got an explanation. So the accent probably contributed to my not being able to understand the movie as well as I should have. The thing that I remember being confused by wasn’t the accent; it was the words.
Easily the most interesting part of New Zealand dialect is the use of Maori words. Some of this even survived into the Japanese version of Whale Rider. Listen to when the characters greet each other. “Kia ora!” they say. It means something like, “be well / healthy.” These are words that I should have known in high school. So now I’m going to do what I should have done then. I’m going to comb through the movie and see what other good words I can hear, have a dictionary (or Wikipedia) open, and learn. Because I’m pretty sure that is the point of the movie Whale Rider – learn and grow.
今日はフランスのティファンとUSAのエリカとイギリスのデイビッドと日本のアズミがいます。
